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“Wasn’t that a time? Wasn’t that a time to try the souls of men? Wasn’t that a terrible time?”

The lyrics from a sixties folk song made popular by Peter Paul and Mary reverberate through the decades and remain relevant today.

Unfortunately.

The lyrics to the folk song harken back to the war for American independence and major conflagrations waged since including World Wars I and II.

I recently bought an album by Tom Paxton. Listening to his music on YouTube brought me back to the turbulent sixties and my love for the folk artists who became popular then. Listening to these songs of social conscience and satire, love ballads, Children’s songs and others that reflect beautifully, poignantly and heartfully on our human experience, I am struck by the purity of this music. It moves me deeply. It penetrates my soul. It inspires me to pick up my guitar and sing.

Looking back, I realize that these artists, these wandering troubadours, were great men and women. Some of them are still alive and singing. What a time the sixties were. What noble visions for a better world, given voice by these passionate musicians, arose from the struggle.

Some of these visions have been realized. We live in a better world today in some respects. Yet we haven’t yet learned our lessons. We live in a world where human beings still murder other human beings in the name of God. We live in a world where a Russian President is intent upon restoring Russia to its Cold War boundaries by invading autonomous neighbor states. We live in a world where hatred and intolerance still threaten our very existence.

I enjoy reading words of inspiration as much as you probably do. I believe in the power of positive thinking. I love practicing the art of creative visualization. (My man Jordan Spieth, last week’s winner of the US Open Golf Championship, is the ultimate practitioner of creative visualization.)

Having said this, I have to say something more. You probably guessed I’d go on for a bit in this week’s blog. It takes more than a stranger’s words to affect lasting, positive change and success in any endeavor. It takes loving support from caring mentors. The ideal personification of this support comes from a set of caring, loving parents. Let’s take Jordan Spieth again as an example. He seems to have an ideal relationship with his loving, caring, teaching parents plus a monumental talent that have helped him to win two major golf titles in his young and promising career.

Jason Day, a young professional golfer from Australia, battled bravely through dizziness and nausea caused by vertigo to finish high in the US Open final standings. Jason, unlike his contemporary Spieth, did not have a strong connection with his parents while growing up. He had a troubled youth before meeting Colin Swatton at Kooralbyn, a golf-centric boarding school in south-east Queensland. Jason’s mother had to borrow money to send her son to Kooralbyn in a desperate attempt to do something about his delinquent behavior after his father died of stomach cancer when Jason was 12.

Colin Swatton was a golf instructor at Kooralbyn when he first met the head-strong, rebellious Day. Swatton’s non-confrontational style won Jason over. When Swatton moved on to teach at Hills International College, Day followed him. From there, Swatton became Day’s golf coach, mentor, close friend and full-time professional caddie. Jason Day is now one of the top-ranked golfers in the world with a family of his own and the admiration and affection of his peers.

After I’ve read a self-help book the inspiration and advice usually fade within forty-eight hours. Formulaic self-help exercises quickly become dry practices that yield little or lasting benefits. I picked up a few Wayne Dyer books a year ago and two things became immediately clear: (1) Wayne has a lot of nice things to say and (2) I could not practice or live what Dyer says if I tried for a million years.

So what does it take to move forward, achieve, and grow? To amplify what I said earlier, it takes a special personal relationship. It is a relationship that always accepts and honors who you are and where you are. It can be a parental, mentoring, teaching, romantic, or friend to friend relationship. In the case of the first three, the relationship begins with the child, mentee, or student receiving more at first. I’ve learned that over time the best of these relationships blossom into mutuality where both parties reap significant rewards. There’s an energy and information exchange in these relationships; call it love, call it caring and concern, call it chemistry. Whatever it is, it’s a radiant, magic elixir. It produces extraordinary human beings; some famous and others who live and work quietly outside of the limelight.

Doing nothing can be fun or boring depending upon your outlook and level of creativity. What if you didn’t have to do anything except answer the call of nature and buy groceries? What would you do—or not do.

I think most of us would agree that doing absolutely nothing becomes boring. The real challenge, I feel, lies in staying very busy while actually doing very little of major consequence, especially anything that might cause the slightest bit of pain.

I’m at a point where I need to find something to do that I can tell myself is very important, yet doesn’t require a significant degree of sacrifice. I’m allergic to the word sacrifice in the same way Maynard G. Krebs was allergic to the word work.

I have a couple of major projects on the drawing boards that require the participation of other people. Until they are at liberty to work with me, I’m at loose ends.

This morning, I went into deep meditation with the intent of coming up with, at the very least, a brilliant idea for the blog you are now reading. I came up with nothing, nada, zilch. I wonder how this is possible. It’s not, by a long shot, the first time this has happened. Creative, constructive ideas come easily to some people. They have more ideas than they have time to manifest them. I have plenty of time but no ideas. This seems like an injustice.

I thought that by writing about nothing, a great idea would arise out of the void. Well, the void is still there. Where are you Mister or Miss Great Idea? How about if I settle for a medium idea? Still no?

In my last blog, I promised to write more about my residential retreat with Saniel and Linda Groves-Bonder at their home in Sonoma, California. I left you and me hanging on the question whether I would have enough to talk about during my two-day retreat. It turns out my fear was almost groundless. I did run out of “personal stuff” to bring forward, but it didn’t matter. We filled the space by working on two projects I’m doing with Saniel and Linda, and by simply being together in simple, every-day terms.

For instance, I volunteered to drive Saniel into Sonoma to do some errands, including buying cat food and six rather large sacks of bird seed. Linda likes to feed the birds—every one of them, it seems, living in Sonoma County and beyond. I can imagine word of mouth traveling at warp speed within the aviary community about delicious, free food.

Have you ever been inside a hay/grain/birdseed store? Not this city slicker. I had only been to the main “drags” in town. Saniel helped me to experience Sonoma from a resident’s point-of-view. It’s a quaint country town with a population of only 10,400. Let me add, I gave myself a few extra days to explore some of the surrounding cities. I found Sausalito to be the most interesting of these. It’s a beautiful town overlooking the San Francisco Bay with lovely homes terraced into the hills and populated by artists, musicians, New-Age thinkers, and other adventuresome souls. The more conventional residents were probably working in nearby San Francisco somewhere across the Golden Gate Bridge. The weather in northern California at this time of year can only be described as “glorious and majestic.”

Pardon my digression.

I become really happy around Saniel and Linda thanks to their powerful transmissions. During our time together, we laughed, worked hard, and had lots of fun. There was a bonus event (for me) on Sunday called “a sitting” where Saniel and Linda hosted nine local people for a two-hour session of meditation and sharing.

After these two and a half days, I’m cooked. I can’t say if I’m rare, medium, or well-done. I just know I’m cooked and it’s a good thing.

While meditating at the Sunday morning sitting an image came to me: hands knitting golden threads into a golden rope. The image suggested to me a certain perfect harmony that surrounded everything Saniel, Linda and I said and did. There was another entity at work with us, weaving together the strands of our collective efforts into a golden rope. Everything that happened just sort of fell into place, as if by magic. (I know what my next book project will be about. It fell into my lap as lightly as a feather.) The golden rope brought us closer together; more comfortable in our Being and knowing of one another—linked heart-to-heart, now and into the future.

007 has a license to kill. Insurance companies have a license to steal. Here’s a typical example.

My mother suffers from back pain mostly due to her advanced age. Her doctor prescribed lidocaine patches for the pain. The patches are expensive, almost five hundred dollars per box. My mother’s Blue Cross Blue Shield supplemental insurance declined to cover the patches. Why? According to BCBS, the FDA says the proper diagnosis for prescribing this patch is diabetes. What? Did BCBS make that up? Sounds like it.

What’s the real reason for squirming out the responsibility to cover the patch? Answer: it’s too damn expensive. So let’s find a reason not to cover it.

According to AARP, 200 million insurance claims are rejected every year. Insurance companies try to spread their risk and keep as much money in their organization for as long as possible as they “adjudicate a claim.” They use auditing software to sift through millions of submitted claims. These programs are often referred to as “denial engines” because their intent is to lower the amount of claims paid out.

Can we chalk this thievery up to rising medical costs? No. Insurance companies pay only a fraction of what doctors and hospitals charge. I can hear the insurance company executives laughing in their Dayton, Ohio offices (which are located a long way from my little Starbucks table in Aventura, Florida.)

We need insurance reform badly. I’m not talking about Obamacare. To facilitate their criminal activities, insurance companies hire supermen lobbyists with some of the money they should be paying out in claims. They buy yachts, homes, Bentleys, commercial real estate, investment securities and commodities with the rest of their profits. They win. We lose.

It’s time for the public to start suing insurance companies en masse. My daughter is preparing to become a prosecutor. When she reaches the Federal level, watch out Aetna, Blue Cross, and all you other bums!

Thank you gas stations across America for invading one of the last bastions of peace and quiet I have (had). I can no longer pump gas with only my thoughts to keep me company. Now I must listen to a moronic advertisement and a news sound bite repeated endlessly and finally an admonition at the end to like Gas TV on Facebook and Twitter. This request is the ultimate example of adding insult to injury.

Gas TV is a new phenomenon, yet I already yearn for the days when I could quietly observe the random mixture of people crossing paths at the gas station and wonder about their lives.

Are you happy? Are you sad? Are you stressed out? What are you heatedly saying into your cell phone while making those intense gestures? Who is on the other end? What is your relationship? Are you always enmeshed in some daily drama of one kind or another? Are you well-to-do or have you spent your last dime to impress me with that Mercedes 550e?

I miss the opportunity a gas station stop provided to take inventory of my day’s to-do list. Gas TV has also stolen the precious minutes I had to re-assess my existential situation.

Gas TV is some asshole’s greedy idea to make money any way possible without regard to my peace of mind. It is another idiot’s stupid decision to buy it.

A year after writing Scarlet Ambrosia, I see the story through a different pair of eyes. At the core of the novel is a young man’s struggle with darkness and light. The vampire archetype, I now realize, is a metaphor for my heart’s dream to realize its divine nature. The supernatural powers and ramped up energy level Devon acquires as a vampire make him half-human and half-god, something like the mythological Greek gods. He can choose to use his new powers for good or evil purposes.

*Blog title inspired by Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”

About

After a career in marketing communications, I turned my attention to creative writing. To date, I've written three feature length screenplays and three novels. At this point, I am determined to become less serious.